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17 CHAPTER ONE Loss, Love, and the Work of Learning Lessons from the Teaching Life of Anne Sexton Depression is boring, I think, and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave. —Anne Sexton, “The Fury of Rain Storms” The secret must sneak, insert, or introduce itself into the arena of public forms; it must pressure them and prod known subjects into action. . . . —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Long before her death, Anne Sexton meticulously typed her manuscripts and kept carbon copies of her letters. “She was,” observes her biographer, Diane Wood Middlebrook, “a self-documenting person: from childhood on she kept scrapbooks of treasured moments; from the earliest months of what was to become her professional life she . . . dated worksheets of poems . . . she saved correspondence , photographs, clippings” (Middlebrook, 1991, xxii). Sexton’s many hospitalizations, taped psychiatric sessions, therapy notebooks, and medical evaluations also generated a rich collection of data that was, in 1978, transferred to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin by Sexton’s oldest daughter and the executor of her estate, Linda Gray Sexton. Sexton often hoped aloud that her poetry would endure to offer comfort and insight to those who, like herself, suffered the unrelenting pain of mental illness and addictions. The archive of Anne Sexton reveals an unconventional teaching life; reading the contents of Sexton’s archive provokes in the reader a 18 ANNE SEXTON particular form of melancholia that is associated with a life falling apart, a terminal , unrelenting, inexplicable mental illness that resulted in Sexton’s ending her life by carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 46. After returning home from lunch with her close friend, Maxine Kumin, she climbed into the driver’s seat of the old red Cougar she bought in 1967,the year she started teaching,and turned on the ignition (Middlebrook, 1991, 397). *** It is July 1994. I am working in the archives at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, shuffling through some folders that contain correspondences Sexton exchanged with her students.¹ I’m hungry, restless, and feeling stiff from sitting all day, so I decide to take a walk. Before I leave, I randomly pull a letter from the file, skim through it, planning to return to it later in the day. I note that the letter was written by Chris Leverich, an English major at Colgate University during the spring of 1972, and that the letter is in fact a substitute for the final assignment—an imagined interview with Anne Sexton. In his letter, Leverich details a trail of memories, lost expectations , and emotions that he has kept to himself throughout the term.“In a way, I’ve fallen in love with you,” he writes, Of course, it’s a fantasy. I know that. Yet, there is something, a force, a charm that is ever powerful and ever attractive to me. So many times I’ve wanted to be alone with you, to talk to you, to break the formalities of student and teacher. . . . I guess that’s a fair summation of my first feelings toward you: an initial sexual attraction gradually honed into a mixture of respect and admiration . As the semester went on and I got more and more into your poetry whole new horizons opened up before me. I knew I was reading your life and what it was to you.² Leverich goes on to capture, with tremendous exactitude, the sense of loss he felt for never having really gotten to know Anne Sexton, noting that the end of the term would mark the last time he would hear her voice. He writes, I sort of resigned myself to never knowing you, even after that little spark flared up in me when you called my name—“Chris.” But it seemed like only a reflex action after Bruce said it. Still, I wanted it to roll around over your tongue. I wanted you to say it again in your head and remember it. I couldn’t stand that you wouldn’t even remember my name someday. Like you said in class about John Holmes: “If you leave someone without having them love you, then you lose them.” I knew we would leave that way and I would lose.³ The explicitly sexual content of this letter can be read as an Oedipal narrative —a son’s longing for his mother—and contains images of a...

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